The Google Reader Redesign is an Ugly, Lonely User Experience

So Google finally went and killed off the social features in Google Reader. They also gave it a face lift, apparently in an attempt to make it look more like the new Gmail and Google Plus. Aesthetic uniformity across products makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, the new Google Reader look is ugly. Really ugly.

Too much white space surrounds near-colorless content. Even the links are gray. Far from an improvement, the redesign makes the new Reader look empty. It's not pleasant to read on at all, which sort of defeats the purpose of an RSS service.

On the aesthetics of it alone I give Google a "D" for Disaster.

So what about the new user experience?

Well, all the social features are gone, which means you no longer have a handy "People You Follow" section. I was expecting some integration with Plus on this front - perhaps a "Circles" section where you could see shares from Plus in Reader. No such luck.

To view shared items you have to hop over to the next tab and navigate around Plus. That's annoying, but what's worse is that in Plus only excerpts of shared items appear, so if you want to read the whole thing you have to go back over to Reader or to the original site it came from. Which, again, sort of defeats the purpose.

Sharing is no walk in the park, either. You either have to use the Google Bar's share box or go through several sharing steps at the bottom of a post. I also found that on the "home" page of Reader, clicking the links there often sends you nowhere at all. So add to all the design flaws a few bugs and you have yourself a dead product.

I give the new Google Reader user experience an "F" for Fail.

There's almost no way Google could have blundered more disastrously here, and even former Google Reader developers are saying as much. Brian Shih, a former Google employee and Reader developer, writes:

The frustrating thing is that these pitfalls could have been avoided through a more thought out integration. As Kevin Fox has already pointed out, Google could have easily made it so that sharing was pushed through G+ (therefore giving providing content on G+, and gaining all the benefits of an integration), but also replaced shared items from People You Follow with a Reader-specific Circle.

But no - instead, they've ripped out the ability to consume shared items wholesale from the product. The closest analogue might be if Twitter made it so that 3rd party clients could use the Retweet functionality to push Retweets to a user's stream -- but only allowed you to consume Retweets on twitter.com.

It's almost as if Google wants to demonstrate that, yes, they don't really get platforms. Instead of improving the G+ API to support Reader as a fully functional 3rd party client (a la Twitter), they've instead crippled the product under the guise of improvements.

In a less noticeable but arguably more important change, Google has also clamped down on use of its MapsAPI. Whenever you visit a web page with an embedded map (like this one), chances are overwhelming that the person who created the map used Google to do it. In the past, non-commercial use of the Maps API was essentially unlimited. Now, Google has decided that anyone hosting a map that gets more than 25,000 hits in a day has to pay a fairly steep fee. To put that in perspective, if I embedded a map in a front page post at midnight, we’d probably hit the limit sometime around mid-morning.

Google’s done something similar with its Google Apps product, which allows businesses and organizations to host email and other Google services under their own domain. In other words, Apps lets you have a yourname@yourdomain.com email address while using gmail. That product launched with a 500 user limit, which was reduced to 50, and is now 10.

In all of these cases, Google has engaged in classic predatory behavior. They drop a free product in a market where a number of small, entrepreneurial solutions are operating. This free product is either better (Reader), or better and cheaper (Maps and Apps). Google keeps the low or free price long enough to drive the competition out of business. Then, they either monetize (Maps and Apps) or bastardize (Reader) the Google product.

"Unless the Google product you’re using shows you ads, runs on a mobile phone, or is somehow competing with Facebook," writes mistermix, "prepare to either pay or be disappointed."

When it comes to Google Reader, a pay option would have been fine. The disappointment all of us Reader fanatics feels right now isn't worth it - I'd rather pay for a good service than lose that service altogether.

Yes, I can make sharing work on Google Plus but it's a second-best option. It would have been far better to integrate Plus comments and Circles into Reader rather than integrate in this bizarre, unwieldy fashion. Hopefully Google actually listens to its users in coming weeks and works out some of these wrinkles. If not, I imagine many of us will walk away. Maybe that's what Google has in mind for Reader, but I don't see that as good news for Plus.

On the overall changes as well as the unhelpful response from Google to its user base I give the new Google Reader a big, fat "E" for Evil.

I guess the company's slogan really was just a slogan. What fools we were to think it might have been anything more than that.

Oh, and P.S. I really do appreciate the Atlantic Wire's coverage of all of this - including their story on how Francis Cleary is building a new replacement for Reader, which I know I and many others are pretty excited about - but will you please stop calling all Reader junkies "Sharebros?" We are Not All Sharebros. I had never heard the term before this whole mess.

In my Reader niche the only term I ever heard passed around was "Hivemind" (the new name for Cleary's Reader clone is HiveMined) and never once did I ever hear a single Reader user call anyone a Sharebro. I have no doubt many Reader users did refer to themselves this way, but the whole fascinating thing about Reader is that it consisted of a sea of user islands.

If you were in the Hivemind you might never have heard of that other user island where the barbaric Sharebros lived. Maybe there were other Reader enclaves where people called themselves The Others. Who can say? Now, we'll likely never know.